Stray Thoughts

While driving home a couple of nights ago, I heard 97.1 FM The Drive's Ten @ 10, in which ten songs from a particular year are played in a block. The feature first plays at 10:00 in the morning, but if I ever hear it at all, it's when it's rerun at 10:00 the same night. The other night it was 1971, which had a number of good albums, and DJ Bob Stroud spotlighted Who's Next. Now, Who's Next is a particularly strong album with a lot of great songs from which to choose, but Stroud highlighted John Entwistle's "My Wife." If you're not as obsessive about albums as I am (and why would you be, after all?), you'll be forgiven for not remembering that Who's Next features numbers such as "Won’t Get Fooled Again," "Baba O'Reilly," and "Behind Blue Eyes." Okay, maybe you don't want a CSI commercial, but you could easily go to the second tier with such titles as "Going Mobile," "Bargain," or "The Song Is Over." Not to speak ill of the dead or anything, but "My Wife" was famously the point in a Who show when Roger would take a break, Pete would catch his breath, and John would take over to give the audience an excuse to go to the bathroom or check out the T-shirt concession. But Ten @ 10 redeemed itself by closing 1971 with T. Rex's "Jeepster," so I guess I can't complain too much.

Speaking of wives, I recently discovered that another old friend from college had taken her husband's name when she married. We'd dated for a while, and I don't recall whether that subject ever came up (if it did, it was only in passing, because we were never serious enough to talk about it as an actual choice), but I always assumed that she'd keep her maiden name. In fact, with one or two exceptions, I pretty much assumed that all my friends would keep their own names. Almost straight across the board, though, none of them did. One woman explained to me that her name had been her identity for twenty-some years and that she had no expectation that she could simply toss it away for her future husband's name, which was an idea that made absolute sense to me. When she got married, she tried to do a hyphenation (and, if memory serves, her husband took the hyphenated name, as well), but she soon found it unwieldy and dropped it in favor of her husband's name. (In fairness, though--all lofty principles aside--she never really liked her maiden name all that much to begin with.) I joined another friend in a heated discussion with a man who insisted he was very proud of his name and expected his wife to be proud of it, as well. My friend asked why the future wife didn't get to be equally proud of her own name, but the question was left lingering in the air. And yet this friend took her husband's name when she married a few years later.

One woman's last name made her an easy target for dirty jokes, so she was more than happy to trade it in when she got married, and after she divorced, she kept her married name. She's married again, and I believe she took her new husband's name. (The whole topic of divorce adds an odd note to this, too. If you took your first husband's name and held on to it after a divorce, it seems you're almost obliged to take your next husband's name if you marry again. Otherwise, you'd be using a name that has no real connection to you or your husband.) But other than that, there's only one woman friend from college (that I know of) who married and kept her maiden name.

I always assumed that the woman I married would keep her own name (because that's the kind of woman I expected to marry), and as it happens, she did (although she did change her first name). We know a few married couples who have different last names, but not really all that many. I can't bring to mind more than one woman I know who hyphenates. When I was in college, starting to contemplate the idea of such a long-term relationship and all that it might entail, this certainly seemed like the trend of the future. Maybe I just don't know the trendy people, but it seems like it's mostly fizzled. Is my experience too limited? Are there larger numbers of married couples with different last names than I'm noticing? Or are we just comfortable settling back into the patriarchy?